[ARSCLIST] ERPANET Announces ErpaEPrints at IFLA2003 Berlin

[Swiss Editor <Swiss.editor@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

*****************************
ERPANET Announces ErpaEPrints
at IFLA 2003, Berlin
*****************************

In their 1999 report on "Digital Archaeology: Rescuing Neglected and Damaged Data Resources", Ross and Gow used 199 online references. Today, only 32% of these resources remain accessible. This lack of persistence remains a continuing cause for concern.  ERPANET, in collaboration with Project Daedalus, announced on Wednesday 6 August at IFLA 2003 (Berlin) an ePrints Service for the Digital Preservation sphere to provide a platform to address this problem. ErpaEPrints allows authors and creators to make their works available at a central access point. The service can be found at http://eprints.erpanet.org

Key to ERPANETs rationale is the focus on the dissemination of knowledge. To date, workshops and seminars, conferences, case studies, and an online advisory service have all contributed to widening and expanding the knowledge-base in this sphere. Now ePrints, with its sister product erpaAssessments, is offering further support and knowledge to the community. ErpaAssessments was launched in late 2002, and provides high quality commentaries on key literature and projects in digital preservation. Now with the addition of erpaEPrints, ERPANET is offering not only value added commentaries of literature, but helping to make accessible and preserve the cutting edge primary literature. This service is free of charge to authors and users. 

At the outset of its project ERPANET established a long term preservation strategy to ensure documents created by or accumulated by the project would be available in the future. Materials deposited in the ErpaEPRINTS Archive will benefit from these arrangements.  

Seamus Ross, Principal Director of ERPANET, reported ERPANET is extremely grateful to the DAEDALUS project for enabling us to produce a new service that provides the digital preservation community with the opportunity to build a digital library of ePrints and ensure their long term accessibility.

_Notes_
ERPANET (Electronic Resource Preservation and Network) (IST-2001-32706) is a Fifth Framework European Union Funded activity to enhance the preservation of cultural heritage and scientific digital objects. It is making viable and visible information, best practice, and skills development in the area of digital preservation of cultural heritage and scientific objects.  ERPANET partners include Schweizerisches Bundesarchiv, ISTBAL at the Università di Urbino, Nationaal Archief Nederland, Den Haag, and HATII, at the University of Glasgow. For more information about ERPANET events and services see http://www.erpanet.org  

DAEDALUS is a three year (2002-2005) JISC funded project under the FAIR programme to build a range of freely accessible institutional repositories at the University of Glasgow.  These repositories include published and peer-reviewed papers, working papers, grey literature, and theses. For more information about the DAEDALUS Project see http://www.gla.ac.uk/daedalus